Challenge

A major healthcare manufacturer was running out of network bandwidth after experiencing explosive global growth of their business and changing IT application requirements. Employees were complaining about their ability to collaborate in global applications like Lync and Office365; executive webcasts were spotty and other collaboration investments like TelePresence weren’t effective. To make matters worse, without the ability to apply quality of service to their WAN, updates on mobile device operating systems were crashing the network.

Looking for better user experience, reliability, higher availability, scalability and visibility, the organization turned to WWT to evaluate how to migrate its outdated WAAS and WAN infrastructure to a programmable solution. Specifically, we were asked to provide architecturally sound and OEM-agnostic recommendations for upgrades at four of the organization’s network hubs.

Solution

WWT conducted workshops with the healthcare manufacturer’s network engineering team to better understand their needs and educate them on leading programmable network solutions. We also brought in their server, application and voice teams to better understand their challenges around network services. We then developed and messaged scorecards within the organization to analyze and rank bandwidth requirements of different departments.

After tallying and rating the responses, the solution was evident: Cisco IWAN with ISR-4000 Routers and WAAS+ Akamai for improved application performance. We combined this solution with Cisco ONE services to provide long-term software support services for the growing network. To ensure the solution would work for the organization’s environment, Cisco invited WWT to participate in a Cisco CPOC lab. The customer provided a test bed to validate the solution and ultimately we were able to work with Cisco to win customer confidence on the solution.

WWT directed equipment through our North American Integration Center in St. Louis for staging and configuration of the hardware to help expedite the deployment. As a single-source vendor, our ability to bundle our professional services, hardware and project management proved invaluable.